December 1, 2018
Although every week of Trump’s presidency has brought new revelations in the Russia investigation, whether it was the indictment of 19 Russian operators of a troll farm who seeded our social media with divisive disinformation, or a 2016 meeting between a Putin backed Russian lawyer and Don, Jr., this week has been qualitatively different. For the first time, Trump himself is squarely in the crosshairs as “Individual 1,” as evidence mounts that allows us to connect the dots between his decades’ long pursuit of a major real estate development in Moscow and the concerted efforts of Russia, acting through WikiLeaks and the Internet Research Agency to interfere in our elections and win Trump the presidency.
This has been a week of unrelenting bad news for the mobbed up autocrat squatting in The White House. Every day has marked a seismic development in the hydra-headed Special Counsel investigation, revealing anew the nest of vipers that populate Trump’s world. Earlier this week, Mueller accused Paul Manafort of breaching his plea agreement by “lying repeatedly to prosecutors,” (Source: “Individual 1* is now a Central Subject of Mueller Probe *a.k.a Trump” by Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post, 11/29/18).
We learned that Manafort had never withdrawn from his joint defense agreement with Trump, as is customary once a defendant has entered a plea agreement. That revelation led to feverish speculation that Manafort and his lawyer were playing the Special Counsel by serving as moles ferrying information to Trump and his attorneys about Mueller’s lines of inquiry.
At the same time that we were learning of Manafort’s ongoing duplicity, right wing gadfly and conspiracy theorist, Jerome Corsi, was elbowing his way into the spotlight with his claim that he had rejected a plea deal with the Special Counsel’s office. Corsi provided the charging documents to several news outlets, which outlined how Corsi and Roger Stone concocted outlandish lies to conceal their communications with WikiLeaks, (Source: “A leaked Mueller draft document provides a glimpse into the investigation’s future,” by Andrew Prokop, Vox.com, 11/27/18). The charging document traces a clear path from the GRU (Russian intelligence) to WikiLeaks to Roger Stone to Trump (pere et fils).
This backdrop made Thursday’s news of the Michael Cohen plea deal that much more momentous. Cohen’s admission that he lied to Congress and that his efforts to secure a deal for Trump World Tower extended far past January 2016, up to the eve of the Republican convention in July, raises the possibility that Trump’s business interests in Moscow included the illegal use of financing from sanctioned Russian banks and that Trump had direct knowledge of his campaign operatives’ collusion with Russian interference in our elections.
As BuzzfeedNews.com exhaustively detailed, Cohen’s confederate in trying to bring Trump World Moscow to fruition was Russian born Felix Sater, a shady character with ties to the Russian Mob who frequently served as an undercover source for U.S. intelligence agencies. Together they worked Russian officials, oligarchs and bankers (Source: “The Crazy True Story of Trump Moscow,” by Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold, BuzzfeedNews.com, 5/17/18). The plan apparently included a promise to give the $50 million dollar penthouse to Vladimir Putin.
Trump knows he’s in real jeopardy. It is obvious from his rage tweeting and his sulking at the G-20, staring enviously at Mohammad bin Salman yukking it up with Vladimir Putin.
Yet while we were distracted by schadenfreude, Republicans in Washington were industriously continuing their quest to destroy our democracy. Only the combination of Jeff Flake’s determination to protect Mueller and a last minute attack of conscience from Tim Scott prevented the confirmation of voter suppression mastermind Thomas Farr to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in North Carolina. The Trump administration announced plans to allow energy companies to “conduct seismic tests in the Atlantic Ocean…that could harm…marine life,” (Source: “Trump’s move towards Atlantic drilling could hurt marine mammals,” by Ben Geman and Andrew Freedman, Axios.com, 11/30/18). Lastly, thanks to an investigation by ProPublica we have learned that the Department of Education has dramatically scaled back the investigation of “systemic civil rights violations by schools and colleges”, dismissing complaints without investigating them.
The point is that we should contain our glee at the prospect of Trump’s impending fall. He is merely fruit of the poisonous tree in a government filled with malevolent people motivated solely by racism and greed. We would do well to remember the words of Winston Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”